KEELY O'CONNOR

ARTIST BIO

Keely O’Connor is a graduate of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University. O’Connor practices painting, drawing, and experimentation with video and performance work about her hometown and family in Rural Upstate New York. Her work speaks on her lower-middle-class upbringing and the moral ambiguity of the “townie” redneck culture she was surrounded by in her youth. O'Connor has had a recent focus on the family photograph, and capturing domestic coercion and generational discomfort through patriarchal and familial dynamics. She was the Arts Management intern at the WaterFire Arts Center in the summer of 2019, assisting Art Director Barnaby Evans with exhibition curating and the set up of his award-winning sculpture installation “WaterFire Providence”. She completed her remote internship in Development with The Trustees and studied Painting at Camberwell in London for a semester. In 2022 she was awarded the Stephen D. Paine Scholarship that was exhibited at the Alpha Gallery to celebrate this accomplishment. Her work "A Summer Day I Can't Remember" was shown in the "Within" remote exhibition through ArtFluent in 2022. She currently works for WaterFire International and is an art assistant for Glyph Haus.